Name: Seagull (Thinking of You)
Brand: Tina Satter
Price: 16.0 USD
Availability: InStock

Seagull (Thinking of You)

$16.00

This is the first collection of plays by OBIE award winning Tina Satter, described as a "rising experimental star" by the New York Times and named a 2011 Off-Off Broadway Innovator to Watch by Time Out New York. Seagull (Thinking of You) is a personal look at performance, failure and attempted love -- ultimately an unexpected meditation on why we ever try to say something out loud. This volume includes the plays Family, named a Top 10 show of 2009 by Time Out New York and Away Uniform.

The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S.

$16.00

By combining literary and dramatic narrative with eye-witness accounts of Sasquatch encounters culled from the internet, The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S. reinvents as many versions of the Frankenstein author Mary Shelley as there are definitions of the word “Gothic.” In this work, a string of financial, maternal, and familial misfortunes causes Shelley—referred to in this production as Maery S.—to spawn a monstrous creative expression, which takes on its own life and violent history. Maery cannot help but fall in love with her Monster, only to see it “collected” and imprisoned by charitable funding at a mandatory artists’ residency.

The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S.

The Lost Conversation

$16.00

In this collection of interviews conducted between 2019-2021 with New York theater artists who have spent their lives working in and inventing the avant-garde, playwright Sara Farrington brings to light a series of "lost conversations" about class, race, difficulty, endurance, and privilege in the New York avant-garde of the past fifty years, as well as conversations about the ephemerality, the always-about-to-be-lostness of the medium itself. Featuring conversations with Joanne Akalaitis, Anne Bogart, Lee Breuer, Ping Chong, Richard Foreman, Andre Gregory, Deborah Hay, Bill T. Jones, Adrienne Kennedy, Lola Pashalinksi, Jennifer Tipton, Kate Valk, Mac Wellman, and Robert Wilson, The Lost Conversation is also a record both of the avant-garde's past and of its urgent present.

Wheelchair

$17.00

Wheelchair, by Pulitzer Prize finalist Will Arbery, follows the shifting lives of cities, apartments, objects, and a man named Gordon. Even though he's being evicted, Gordon believes himself to be one of God’s thirty-six chosen people. In this play, which teeters between comedy and tragedy, people and refrigerators speak of their despairs and fantasies.

404 Not Found

$14.00

In Lucas Baisch’s 404 Not Found, we find ourselves at the back of a clay building that signals “stay away, stay awake.” Slack has a bad habit of holding people captive and now he’s the one shackled to a metal grate. Ro makes ends meet through drag-play for a truck-stop benefactor. She leverages her wages to travel down the neck of the Americas, making herself invisible along the way. Her cousin Cameo carries cups of water to Slack, then retreats to La Barranca, a digital landscape of his own invention where he encrypts documents for asylum-seekers—until one day, an anonymous disruptor forces him to meet at a new clay building that Cameo didn’t make. A twisting, twisted work of intricacy, density, and despair netted in kidnap, virtual utopias, upended borders, and Freddy Krueger cosplay.

Cover image for 404 Not Found, isbn: 9798986581439

Angela's Mixtape / The History of Light

$16.00

Trained in classical piano and Marxism and raised on jazz, gospel, pop, hip hop, and Black revolutionary politics, Pulitzer Prize finalist Eisa Davis’s plays are marked by her stunning intimacy with the praxis of music alongside radical change. In Angela's Mixtape, time shifts like a mixtape, and like a mixtape, the play is both a memoir and a gift—for us, of course, and for Davis’s aunt, activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis, under whose tutelage Davis reads Das Kapital and learns to drive stick and hack her own way toward inheriting her legacy. In The History of Light, Davis counterpoints the intertwining fates of two couples under racialized pressures a generation apart. Lush with the sound of the grand piano, The History of Light is a study in black and white, love and alienation. Underlying the political clarity and formal virtuosity of Davis’s writing are the unexpected crackles of a voice warming up, the crunchiness of missed notes. Because for an artist concerned, like Davis, with how we become who we are and might be, error is a necessary instrument—maybe the sounding weight.

How Gross, My Séances

$14.95

How does the experience of loss alter the ways that we love? How Gross My Séances is a theatre of the imagination, and it takes place in "a world of wounds", a body of grief. The characters are precariously intertwined—memories are animate tattoos (flash sheet included), a chorus of crumbling statues consult and console, and a talk show host interviews our moody antagonist. This is a psycho-drama that interrogates subjectivity, grief and its embodiments, discourse around dispossessed persons, responsibility within and outside romantic love, and the efficacy of language itself.

I Understand Everything Better

$20.00

David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group’s I Understand Everything Better is a "deeply felt and deeply moving" (New York Times) performance piece, a multi-disciplinary, dance-based work that explores the impulse to report on calamity, the shimmer of attention to realms unseen, and the evidence of the body as possessing a will to let go of living.

Emerging from a year in which David Neumann lost both his mother and father, I Understand Everything Better documents a process of dying, and how the altered attentiveness of the dying and those who care for them can invite a complex layering of now and then, here and there, living room and mountain road. The text draws on Neumann’s accounts of his father’s final days as well as Noh theater, the Kyogen play Boshibari, Shakespeare’s King Lear, transcripts of live weather reporting (mostly during hurricanes), and interviews with end-of-life caregivers, doctors, and meteorologists.

Advanced Beginner Group’s 2015 production—winner of two Bessie awards for Outstanding Production and Outstanding Sound Design—includes text by David Neumann and Sibyl Kempson. Edited and designed by Karinne Keithley Syers with photography by Maria Baranova, this volume is an elegant, richly layered record of a rigorously collaged, collaborative performance that was itself a record of a storm.

Suicide Forest

$12.00

Written to be performed by a Japanese heritage cast, Suicide Forest is a bilingual play that breaks through the silence and submissiveness often associated with Japanese and Japanese American identity, exploring questions of emotional, psychic and social suicide through the playwright's lived stories and inner landscape.

No President

$16.00

A small but successful security company staffed with former actors has been hired to protect a certain precious theater curtain – and whatever mystery it conceals behind it.

But things are about to get out of hand as the guards find themselves infiltrated by a rival security company composed of ex-ballet dancers, who are not only artistically more up to date, but also faster and cheaper, and who want to take over this important gig at any cost.

In the end, as always in this contemporary world – where all conflicts are resolved through violence and cannibalism – life plays its fickle games of friendship, love, betrayal, and finally, we hope, redemption. No President is a story ballet of enlightenment in two immoral acts from the internationally acclaimed Nature Theater of Oklahoma.

Futures: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab Theater

$25.00

An anthology of six new plays written in Arabic, published here in English translation. Including five plays selected from over 500 submissions to Masrah Ensemble’s 2021 Open Call and one by Masrah Ensemble’s former playwright-in-residence, these six texts—by Yasser Abu Shaqra, Arzé Khodr, Rim Mejdi, Wael Qaddur, Nasr Sami, and Leila Tubal—represent a diverse array of voices and styles, and push at the limits of theatrical form and public discourse. The volume features an introduction by theater writer/director/academic Hanan Qassab Hassan along with short introductions to the plays by US-based playwrights Lucas Baisch, Jess Barbagallo, Agnes Borinsky, Nazareth Hassan, Kristen Kosmas, and Haruna Lee.

Ruby by Leila Tubal (Tunisia)

Translated by Hisham Ben Khamsa, with an introduction by Haruna Lee

A rhythmic monologue, lyrical and dark, in which a woman unpacks a life of misogyny and violence as she prepares to meet her daughter for the first time.

Braveheart by Wael Qaddur (Syria)

Translated by Clem Naylor, with an introduction by Lucas Baisch

A play about a group of friends writing a novel together, in which relationships collapse and get rebuilt through the act of writing. How do you move out of a state of war into a time of presumed stability?

Eternity by Rim Mejdi (Morocco)

Translated by Melanie Magidow and Caline Nasrallah, with an introduction by Kristen Kosmas

A young woman is stuck on a train, and just wants to get off. An allegorical knot of a play that moves between liveness and video, vernacular and formal Arabic, with interludes from Rimbaud's French.

Sometimes We Remember by Arzé Khodr (Lebanon)

Translated by Clem Naylor, with an introduction by Nazareth Hassan

A Fornesian diamond of a play that unfolds in a series of seemingly simple domestic and urban scenes, about the lure of dwelling in memories of war.

Dog and Cat Pizza Chapters by Nasr Sami (Tunisia)

Translated by Sam Kimball, with an introduction by Jess Barbagallo

A dizzying trip into a world of violence and distortion, by way of the Biblical Song of Songs. In which cats are nailed to walls, and two lovers seek to become one.

Unsettled by Yasser Abu Shaqra (Palestine/Syria)

Translated by Zeina Halabi, with an introduction by Agnes Borinsky

A Syrian family arrives as refugees in Europe, where life does not resemble what they imagined. Over the course of the play, each member of the family finds themselves backed deeper and deeper into a corner, and “safety” proves a devil’s bargain.

Cover image for Futures: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab Theater, isbn: 9798986581491

THE HOLY GHOST PEOPLE

$14.95

It's easy to dismiss the Holy Ghost People. They travel door-to-door in white sheets spouting pseudoscience about time travel, wormholes, and a new galactic gospel. Most of the town has already laughed them away. But when the Holy Ghost People start to perform "miracles," denial becomes difficult, and conversation quickly shifts to what ought to be done.

The Invention of Monsters / Plays for the Theatre

$14.95

Somewhere between monologue and stage direction, the one-act plays in The Invention of Monsters / Plays for the Theatre center around what it means to be ill-cast in life. How it feels to wear a costume, a body, a face. How sex can be both transformative and nightmarish. Each scene-poem is the tip of an iceberg, evoking a larger performance rather than operating as a conventional script. A new kind of theatre text, these plays/poems beg to be performed, with exactly how depending entirely on the reader.

Meronymy

$14.00

Context, Synecdoche, Homonym, and Polyseme live in a house laden with clutter, but Etymology keeps bringing new deliveries for Context: a blank book, a conversation with the dentist, a key. Homonym and Polyseme sort and rearrange; they send what they can to the cloud (via helium balloon); occasionally they smuggle out old things, lost for years, and new things they know Context will never need. Synecdoche tries to hold it all together and sings. Meanwhile, Context wonders whether listening is work—if it is labor, if it matters, and if what matters (if it matters) can be retrieved from the ever-accumulating material of living. meronymy is a kaleidoscopic, audiovisual performance-portrait of the technologies, ancient and modern, by which we cling to what we might otherwise forget. With wry tenderness and formal dexterity, Jendrzejewski builds a space in which to reckon with memory, loss, intrusion, and overflow amidst the cacophonic practice of living in language together.

bull-jean & dem/dey back

$14.00

bull-jean & dem/dey back collects two performance/novels centering Sharon Bridgforth’s southern-Black-butch-sheroe, bull-jean.

First published by RedBone Press in 1998, the Lambda Literary Award-winning the bull-jean stories chronicles the course of lovve returning in the Life-times of bull-dog-jean. Set in the rural 1920s south, the bull-jean stories is an act of griot-anthropology, remembering the ancestor we never knew but always knew we needed—the raucous, sweet-talking, heart-aching wo’mn-lovvn-wo’mn bull-dog-jean and the fierce and beautiful community that surrounds her.

Twenty-two years later, bull-dog-jean returns in bull-jean/we wake. Grieving the loss of their elders, seeking healing, the Narrator calls forward bull-jean. Through a series of dreams, porch prayers, and visitations from cussing conjurers, Black Mermaids, children that fly, and shape-shifting ole folk, bull-jean and dem guide the Narrator towards a realization of the sustaining power of love, memory, community, ritual, and spiritual binding.

SKiNFoLK: An American Show

$14.00

SKiNFoLK: An American Show by Jillian Walker Is a quilted ritual of liberation, bearing witness to the playwright-performer’s identity, heritage and legacy as a Black woman in this America. This ancestor-revering epic collides with blues, jazz, neosoul, pop, rock, and spiritual Black legacies. What will you see in the archive? Who will you meet? What is down at the root? What color is the sky, again?

Ann, Fran, and Mary Ann

$12.00

Ann and Mary Ann are married. They are both neuroscientists and they both witnessed deeply traumatic events when they were young. Now, in the carefully ordered worlds of their marriage and laboratory—which is linked like the two lobes of the brain—Ann and Mary Ann care for, protect, and reflect one another. But when Ann begins to study Fran, a tile artist who is unable to recognize her husband after he commits an unthinkably violent act, Ann and Mary Ann must reckon with what it really means to see and be present to another person. Ann, Fran, Mary Ann is a deeply reflective, reflecting, refracting play about trauma, God, patterns, and the way they live in our bodies, our minds, and acts of love.

Love Like Light

$25.00

Collecting Daniel Alexander Jones's plays and performance texts Bel Canto, Black Light, Blood:Shock:Boogie, clayangels, Duat, Phoenix Fabrik, and The Book of Daniel, this volume offers a panoramic view of Jones's shifting, glimmering, transformational body of work. Each play a provocation to the possibility of a more just world with love as civic practice at its center, Jones's writing moves with lithe and associative grace through histories personal, political, cosmological, and sublime. A reunion not only of Jones's revolutionary work in the course of twenty-five years in the avant-gardes of New York, Austin, and Minneapolis, among others, Love Like Light is also a reunion of collaborators and friends, featuring essays by Vicky Boone, Jacques Colimon, Eisa Davis, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, korde arrington tuttle, Aaron Landsman, Deborah Paredez, and Shay Youngblood and an interview with Faye Price.

Awarded the 2021 PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for his expansive, multidisciplinary, radical body of work, Jones has, in the words of judges Jeremy O. Harris, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and Leigh Silverman, “continued perfecting a dramaturgy all his own based in the traditions of Africana studies, performance studies, queer theory, and mysticism, challenging established traditions while creating space for audiences to ponder what theater is and who it is for.”

A companion volume, Particle and Wave, features a book-length conversation between Daniel Alexander Jones and poet, scholar, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs about Love Like Light and the way that love, like light, suffuses everything and is the condition and power of change in the world.

Rude Mechs’ Lipstick Traces

$14.00

1534: John of Leyden proclaims himself the Favorite of Heaven, runs naked through the streets of Munster, Germany, and forms a society free of laws or private property. 1976: John Lydon proclaims himself an “antichrist,” helps launch a movement to “destroy passersby,” and permanently changes popular culture. Coincidence? In Lana Lesley’s graphic adaptation of the Rude Mechs’ stage adaptation of Greil Marcus’s text, Dr. Narrator and the Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren recount an alternative history of the 20th century via the Sex Pistols, the Cabaret Voltaire, the May ’68 riots, and a handful of medieval heretics. Lipstick Traces is a graphically gritty and intellectually nervy rendition of a theatrically irreverent and physically ecstatic production of a history of “movements in culture that raised no monuments…movements that barely left a trace.”

There There

$16.00

Bilingual edition in English and Russian, with illustrations.

"For those of you still in the market for a New Year’s resolution, here’s a manageable one: Get yourself to... see Kristen Kosmas’s new play, There There. I can’t think of a better way to start the theatergoing year than with this language-drenched, resonant knockout." - New York Times

"A tour de force of a verbal marathon." - Seattle Times

There There is a wildly unpredictable text about being the completely wrong person in the totally wrong place at the exact wrong time doing all the most wrong things, written by one of theater's great poets of failure and surprise, Kristen Kosmas. Christopher Walken, on tour in Russia with a solo show inspired by everyone's favorite Chekhovian sociopath, mysteriously falls off the ladder and is unable to perform. Karen, who apparently proofread the script once, is asked to go on in Walken's place. A precarious bilingual performance duet ensues between Karen and her Russian interpreter, Leo. This volume includes both the Russian and the English text.

A New Practical Guide to Rhetorical Gesture and Action

$25.00

An exciting new volume based on Henry Siddons’ illustrated guidebook for actors, originally published in 1807. The book includes 36 illustrations of contemporary actors reinterpreting gestures from the original book and an introductory essay by James Stanley that explores the history of acting and acting training, placing the book project in a larger historical context.

A New Practical Guide to Rhetorical Gesture and Action

From the Marrow

$25.00

From the Marrow collects nine ritual/jazz performance texts by Sharon Bridgforth, including lovve/rituals & rage, no mo blues, dyke/warrior-prayers, blood pudding, con flama, love conjure/blues, delta dandi, River See, and dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/The Show. Rooted in blues and bristling with the voices of ancestors, lovers, aunties, neighbors, and friends, these texts document Bridgforth’s thirty-year practice of deep listening, collaboration, and care. Shapeshifting, polyvocal, multi-gendered, genre-bending, nonlinear, Bridgforth’s writing innovates form the way the ocean carves the coast: with sensuality, salty humor, aching grief and rage, and with vast, various, and invariable love. The volume includes essays, interviews, and witnessings by Stephanie L. Batiste, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Robbie McCauley, Sonja Parks, Sonja Perryman, Stacey Karen Robinson, and Nia Witherspoon.

Cover image for From the Marrow, isbn: 9798989946167

Bowl EP

$16.00

A 2024 New York Times CRITIC'S PICK

Kelly K. Klarkson and Quentavius da Quitter are in love. Kelly K. Klarkson and Quentavius da Quitter skate and smoke and taste one another’s fingers and snort molly and try to pick a name for their rap group. And then there’s their personal demons: Kelly exorcized hers a long time ago, but Quentavius’s is named Lemon Pepper Wings, and she-he-they is the patron demon of the intimate, and they-he-she created pheromones for their her his graduate thesis, and astrology and all the apps, and the concept of independence, and she-he-they force Kelly and Quentavius to face themselves, in an abandoned pool, alone, in the middle of the galaxy. With live skateboarding and original lyrics by Free Fool: Bowl EP.

Cover image for Bowl EP, isbn: 9798992283945

Wood Calls Out to Wood

$14.00

Even now, Donly suggests, there may be a way of living in radical tenderness that will spell a way forward rather than the end of it all. —Kate Dakota Kremer, CultureBot

Two horses in a neigh-scent relationship, a vacant treehouse in need of a tenant, and a human with a grape for a head. In Corinne Donly's buoyant adaptation of Hieronymus Bosch's fifteenth-century triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, syllables combine to make words and people to make lovers. An elegy to vestiges, a paean to puns, and a theater of peace, Wood Calls Out to Wood pursues Bosch's old paradise through a new alchemy of love, language, and radical tenderness.

Cover image for Wood Calls Out to Wood, isbn: 9798992283914

[morning//mourning]

$14.00

A cry in the dark, gentle yet penetrating…sly and sweet, wistful and winsome and altogether lovable. —New York Times

mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning] is a performance text for an experimental opera that tells the story of what would transpire if all humans disappeared from Earth, starting in the present day and moving to 1.6 billion years into the future when life can no longer survive on the planet. Five characters guide the audience through the changes on Earth as forests grow back, new species evolve, and the human-made world erodes away. This work is a fantastical and playful exploration into the dire political and ethical contradictions that structure current human relations with nature.

Cover image for [morning//mourning], isbn: 9798992283938

Futures: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab Theater (Arabic Edition)

$25.00

An anthology of six new plays written in Arabic, published here in English translation. Including five plays selected from over 500 submissions to Masrah Ensemble’s 2021 Open Call and one by Masrah Ensemble’s former playwright-in-residence, these six texts—by Yasser Abu Shaqra, Arzé Khodr, Rim Mejdi, Wael Qaddur, Nasr Sami, and Leila Tubal—represent a diverse array of voices and styles, and push at the limits of theatrical form and public discourse. The volume features an introduction by theater writer/director/academic Hanan Qassab Hassan along with short introductions to the plays by US-based playwrights Lucas Baisch, Jess Barbagallo, Agnes Borinsky, Nazareth Hassan, Kristen Kosmas, and Haruna Lee.

Ruby by Leila Tubal (Tunisia)

Translated by Hisham Ben Khamsa, with an introduction by Haruna Lee

A rhythmic monologue, lyrical and dark, in which a woman unpacks a life of misogyny and violence as she prepares to meet her daughter for the first time.

Braveheart by Wael Qaddur (Syria)

Translated by Clem Naylor, with an introduction by Lucas Baisch

A play about a group of friends writing a novel together, in which relationships collapse and get rebuilt through the act of writing. How do you move out of a state of war into a time of presumed stability?

Eternity by Rim Mejdi (Morocco)

Translated by Melanie Magidow and Caline Nasrallah, with an introduction by Kristen Kosmas

A young woman is stuck on a train, and just wants to get off. An allegorical knot of a play that moves between liveness and video, vernacular and formal Arabic, with interludes from Rimbaud's French.

Sometimes We Remember by Arzé Khodr (Lebanon)

Translated by Clem Naylor, with an introduction by Nazareth Hassan

A Fornesian diamond of a play that unfolds in a series of seemingly simple domestic and urban scenes, about the lure of dwelling in memories of war.

Dog and Cat Pizza Chapters by Nasr Sami (Tunisia)

Translated by Sam Kimball, with an introduction by Jess Barbagallo

A dizzying trip into a world of violence and distortion, by way of the Biblical Song of Songs. In which cats are nailed to walls, and two lovers seek to become one.

Unsettled by Yasser Abu Shaqra (Palestine/Syria)

Translated by Zeina Halabi, with an introduction by Agnes Borinsky

A Syrian family arrives as refugees in Europe, where life does not resemble what they imagined. Over the course of the play, each member of the family finds themselves backed deeper and deeper into a corner, and “safety” proves a devil’s bargain.

Cover image for Futures: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab Theater (Arabic Edition), isbn: 9798989946105

Joyce Cho Plays

$25.00

Joyce Cho Plays collects five plays by Scott Adkins, Kelly Copper, Karinne Keithley, Sibyl Kempson, and Amber Reed. Ludicrous, lyrical, weird and loving, these plays have in common a total disregard for realistic manifestation of their extravagant, poetic scenarios. Dedicated to proposing solutions for new plays not written with a traditional dramaturgy or staging syntax, the five playwrights of Joyce Cho pursue experiments that challenge the conventions of playwriting as she is known.

In the words of Mac Wellman, “The five playwrights of Joyce Cho—Scott Adkins, Kelly Copper, Karinne Keithley, Sibyl Kempson and Amber Reed—are among the most exciting, imaginative and profound theater writers in our time, in any time. Joyce Cho is a genius, and a genial one. No one is thinking as deeply and as complexly on what our theater is and is not; nor on what she could be. I do not understand the work of these writers in the same way I do not understand the sky, the sea, and the secret of the forest. They are unlike any others I know in the theater of our time. Pay them heed."

The volume includes: Running Commentary No. 4 by Scott Adkins, Christmas Cracker by Kelly Copper, Do Not Do This Ever Again by Karinne Keithley, Zeit af der KurbisGeistNachten by Sibyl Kempson, and The Grand Kindness by Amber Reed.

Cover image for Joyce Cho Plays, isbn: 9798992283907

MILFFEEDSBABYDEER100%Real

$16.00

You are ushered by your own desire into the belly of our collective dreaming. She is in-situ, waiting, being, exposed. Even venery has its triangulations. If you mix the pigments yourself the colors will be more vibrant—and still, don't you long for a clarion call? I'm going to read to you for a while, and you're going to like it, yes? Turn taking is a part of the game. I want you to eat it. Eat it all.

MILFFEEDSBABYDEER100%Real is a transdisciplinary work intersecting with Dance, Theatre, Performance, Music, and Sculpture generated by a multidisciplinary ensemble led by Marcela Michelle. Taking inspiration from Divisionism, Critical and Queer Theories, Kink Play, and the network of experimental performance being made in the Twin Cities, the work is an exercise in scaffolding for ensemble and is curious about reorienting its named relationship to its makers, be they on the stage or in the audience. Border, boundary, discipline, medium, frame, role, position, vantage, viewpoint, yes, no, no but yes, yes but no, I'll do it for you, I like that you like it. The Book is a script, a collection of scores, collected writings on and around the work, and archival images of previous performances.

Cover image for MILFFEEDSBABYDEER100%Real, isbn: 9798989946198

Killing of a Gentleman Defender

$15.00

In some rooms he’s Martin. In others he’s Martín. Hired by a well-funded arts institution on Chicago’s Northside to create a show with Chicago youth about violence on the Southside, Marteen finds himself torn not only by the pronunciation of his name, but by the conflicting needs of the institution and the young people it believes its “serving,” and by a city in a death struggle with its own divided self. Reaching into his own history, he unearths, with his young ensemble, the story of the 1994 murder of soccer star Andres Escobar in Medellín, Colombia, hoping a past-tense allegory of violence in a deeply divided, faraway city will illuminate violence in the deeply divided Chicago of today. Carlos Murillo’s brilliant, rigorous play is haunted and haunting, its meticulously rendered ghosts layered one atop another like history, like lace.

Cover image for Killing of a Gentleman Defender, isbn: 9798989946181

A Field of Telephones

$16.00

This critical reckoning by a celebrated poet re-envisions what scholarship can offer during times of crisis in the humanities and in our own lives. In his acclaimed 2016 book Diving Makes the Water Deep, Zach Savich wrote a memoir of cancer that was also a rowdy essay on teaching, the lyric, and poetic friendship. His urgent new book A Field of Telephones imagines new modes of criticism that can bloom beyond the university and heed the harmonics of the glitch. Through its combination of fictional lectures, performance texts, archival hijinks, and the personal, this book considers how “influence” can offer more than critical ventriloquism and how a “student” is one whose disorientations can reorient the field. Its mock-scholarly and more-than-scholarly modes focus on the life and legacy of the poets Theodore Roethke and Richard Hugo and on the peril at the heart of inspiration.

Fucked and Jolly

$18.00

Fucked and Jolly is a reflective compendium of artist-to-artist interviews commemorating a boffo decade of The Exponential Festival. Squinny at the banters between playwrights, choreographers, and clowns as they encounter one another’s work and discuss prevailing trends of performance in the new millennium, the radical experiments being conducted to bring online onstage (and vice versa), and the post-Downtown performing arts ecosystem. A missive from the still-grinding heart of the contemporary performance community, Fucked and Jolly features conversations with Nic Adams, Tristan Allen, Leonie Bell, Eliza Bent, Theresa Buchheister, Ann Marie Dorr, Salomé Egas, Lena Engelstein, Shawn Escarciga, Lisa Fagan, David Greenspan, Ben Holbrook, Marissa Joyce Stamps, Hannah Kallenbach, Kate Kremer, Sleth Larson, Joey Merlo, Nicolás Noreña, Kyoung Park, Cristina Pitter, Lee Rayment, Evan Silver, Cameron Stuart, Christina Tang, Alex Tatarsky, SB Tennent, Ellpetha Tsivicos, and Bailey Williams.

The Dark Girl Chronicles

$16.00

The Dark Girl Chronicles is a ritual-play cycle designed to crystallize in collective memory the stories of three Black women warriors against state violence—Diamond Reynolds, Rachel Jeantel, and Islan Nettles.

Part Yoruba or Bantu-Kongo sacred story, part communal ritual, and part documentary-manifesto, the three parts of the cycle—Chronicle X: Windows, Chronicle Y: Sugar, and Chronicle Z: Feathers—use court transcripts, police records, and media coverage to analyze the violent interpretive tactics of white supremacy and to restore these events to their own meanings.

Deploying Black feminist technologies of ritual, magic, and spell, The Dark Girl Chronicles traverses deep ocean and deep space, finds difference in the darks of wombs, snail shells, and caves, and holds space for the interiority, vulnerability, and necessary dignity of dark girls.

Cover image for The Dark Girl Chronicles, isbn: 9798986581484

Faun

$12.95

“The book flinches like a school of fish, a murmuration, a murder nation, my colonizer's baby handprint on a paneled wall in a farmhouse in Ovid, Michigan. The book unearths burial mounds and flattens them into fields. My ancestors removed the bones, and I removed arrowheads from the creek, and I held them to my heart, and I searched the grass for blood, but all I saw was a starling. She hid her eggs in my chest, and when I drifted to sleep I saw black-winged, nameless shadows.

This is the Book of Lily.”

In Faun, Brandi George explores the sudden erasure of human and nonhuman populations from her hometown of Ovid, Michigan. Embodying various voices, forms, and media, a young girl named Lily undergoes a series of transformations guided by nymphs, flora, and fauna. A reworking of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Faun also reflects on the themes of sexual violence that often occur in the mythic.

Cover image for Faun, isbn: 9780999724767

The Jim Lehrer Plays

$12.95

It's the first debate of the 2004 presidential campaign and President George W. Bush is determined to kill PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer live on stage. His opponent, Senator Kerry, agrees Lehrer should die—"Indeed, what else tonight besides the manner of Jim Lehrer's execution could be of interest to any man?"—but disagrees on the matter of when and where. 12 years later, Jim Lehrer sits alone in his spacious and indifferently furnished DC suburban home narrating to himself the news of the day. That is until his roommate—also Jim Lehrer—rushes in to warn him of an angry mob descending on their location. Collected here for the first time, Chicago playwright Mickle Maher's The Jim Lehrer Plays—The Strangerer and Jim Lehrer and the Theater and its Double and Jim Lehrer's Double—connect and critique their times' political insanities while pulling inspiration from Camus, Artaud, and Maher's favorite news personality, Jim Lehrer.

Trial in the Woods

$14.95

On the morning of the 5th gibbous moon, Ovelia Otter attacks and kills Pennstin the young wolf at Bear Chondra's Mix Flow Get Up And Go exercise class. That same afternoon, Ovelia Otter is brought before a jury of her peers, Judge Bodon Boar presiding. Prosecutor Lynx believes she should be expelled from animal society immediately, while Defense Squirrel S. argues animal instinct ought not to be prosecuted at all. Witness after witness are called to the stand and the forest's animals hang on the trial's every word—most more interested in the spectacle than its outcome. One part crime procedural and one part fable, Stephanie Barber's Trial in the Woods is a bold new play about ethics, the efficacy of punitive justice, and our (human, American) criminal justice system. It's also very, very funny.

An Ice Cream Truck Stalled at the Bottom of the World

$14.95

Pog sprawls on a couch. Gomey stands by a large globe. Pog sits at the counter. Gomey sits at a table. Two broken lawn chairs, center stage. Pog and Gomey listless in these chairs. Pog and Gomey seated, next to each other, but at different tables. Pog dressed as Punch, or Judy. Gomey dressed as Judy, or Punch. Pog, you know. Gomey, too. In chairs, side by side: Pog and Gomey. Left of center, Pog at a lectern. Right of center, Gomey at a lectern. A post-apocalyptic place, no sign of anyone. Pog dressed in bird mask and long iron sheets. Gomey on stilts. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. The audience almost gets up to leave. A smell of popcorn. Pog puts on a big floppy hat. Gomey is sniffling. Pog, a man, barely. Gomey, another man, also barely.

In their collection of collaborative short plays, poets Jon Cone and Rauan Klassnik introduce us to Pog & Gomey—a Waiting for Godot-esque pair for the new millennium. Except our friends aren't waiting for anyone in particular—they might not even be friends. They're just stuck with each other. But the globe keeps spinning. And an audience has come to watch.

An Ice Cream Truck Stalled at the Bottom of the World

The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish

$14.95

It's the end of the end of the world and the house that holds together our universe is quietly falling apart. The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish is as much about a detective solving his final case as it is the definitive who, what, why, when, where, how & how much of just about everything you have ever imagined.

On Romulus, While Abel Sleeps [A Chthonic Song.]

$12.95

“I told you how I blamed you for so much,
your fist blooming into a prismed silence, a spectral call
for quiet, cheering from the chorus as your fist anoints
liquid mercury to my lips, the sign to all that I have
succumbed to your weight, wordless.

Brother, if you called for purple, I would give you amethyst
from my mouth; if blue, water and a sail.”

Guided by Dante, Freud, and a pantheon of other literary and mythical figures, Justin Limoli travels to hell and back in this new play about brotherhood, loss, and what it means to keep writing when all you write about is grief. A stand-alone work as well as a follow-up to Bloodletting in Minor Scales [A Canvas in Arms.], Limoli's latest blurs the intersection of play and poetry even further, creating something both beautiful and wholly unique in the process.

On Romulus, While Abel Sleeps [A Chthonic Song.]

A Failed Performance

$19.95

People disappear without explanation. The government takes hostages. War and death occur without reason or meaning. The cycle of poverty and deprivation proliferates. A Failed Performance is a collection of bizarre and darkly humorous plays and scenes from the Russian avant-garde writer Daniil Kharms. This collection—the first volume in English dedicated entirely to Kharms's dramatic works—includes his major stage plays Elizaveta Bam and Lapa as well as lesser-known sketches and hybrid poem-plays, most of which were never published or performed during his lifetime.

In Which _______ and Others Discover the End

$12.95

Emerging from a densely layered collaboration between performers, audience, visual environment, and sound, In Which _______ and Others Discover the End grapples with the current generation's collective, unconscious anxiety that the world may in the foreseeable future be uninhabitable for humans. Taking inspiration from scientific discoveries (the identification of a new knee ligament, a new class of mathematical shape, the previously unknown mating spot of the blue whale) that are continually updating what we think we know, In Which asks us to acknowledge that we live in a world of uncertainty through an expansive rumination on the ways we embody polarity, mystery, mortality, discovery, and change.

In Which _______ and Others Discover the End is a collaboration between performance collective SuperGroup and experimental playwright Rachel Jendrzejewski. This publication includes illustrations of the original performance, music notation, and a foreword by Lara D. Nielsen.

The Last Thing I'll Ever Write (Part One)

$12.95

You feel The Spiral unfurling within you. You're moving carefully, carelessly (take your pick), past a window or a tree or a person, and in the back of your head suddenly you hear the voice of the Spiral wheeze:

"Onward and upward and outward, this is growth, this is evolution. You are in this city and I am here too, with you and without you. I'm here to connect you with the outside, with what's been trying to get in, trying to get you on and up and out. Take my hand and you can be as elastic and as flexible as me. I'll stretch your insides thinner and thinner until finally you'll be able to expand, extend, expend yourself onward and upward and outward, and you'll escape this city, you'll escape that window and that tree and that person, every person that you feel such love/hate/indifference for (take your pick) and you'll grow thinner and paler and ever more transparent, but you'll be taller and longer and your eyes will be clearer and your imaginary embrace will encompass not only this city but all cities, all worlds, and your compassion will exceed even that of God's by virtue of your complete, utter, perfect inability to act on it, to spend it, to waste it on anyone at all. You'll finally be able to keep your love to yourself, untouched, untapped, pure and deep and preserved by your own inevitable valueless hate. And together we'll continue to unfurl, carefully, carelessly (take your pick), until we cover so much space that regardless of what we look like to others we'll know that we've discovered something we can finally un-call Truth."

And you say:

"Fuck off Spiral, I have shit to do."

A full-length debut on communication, intimacy, and despair as told through poetry, dreamscapes, and scenes from an existential sitcom, Adam Lauver's The Last Thing I'll Ever Write (Part One) will lovingly reach down your throat and pull out a series of vaguely Jurassic noises you can't quite identify as a laugh or a sob.

The Last Thing I'll Ever Write (Part One)

Arcadia, Indiana

$12.95

Arcadia, Indiana is a mutant tragedy, a five act-sonnet sequence, staged in the trash-choked landscape of pastoral fantasy. It plays with narrative, labor, sexuality, and form, starting with a murder in an Indiana steel factory and ending with the Sphinx refusing all of Oedipus' solutions to her riddles. This play is a Renaissance tragedy in contemporary drag, destabilizing literary boundaries to develop a poetics of trash, in which the repressed and discarded parts of (literary) history return to strangle their point of origin.

Exit, Pursued

$14.95

A one-act play in which apologies must be made to Chekhov. A one-act play in which there is a blueprint, & that blueprint is ignored entirely. A one-act play in which a decision is made, but it is unclear by or for whom. A one-act play in which the wind has the smallest hands, no, even smaller than that. Over the course of 41 one-act plays—most of them starring the characters ME and YOU—Dalton Day investigates grief, love, anxiety, and loss in this stunning collection of dramatic poetry.

MEDEA

$14.95

Through a mix of sound-poems, dance, and traditional scenes, Catherine Theis attempts to jostle Medea from her traditional, male-defined narrative in this modern retelling set in the mountains of Montana. A 2015 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers finalist, MEDEA features a Chorus of Flames, choreography for The Milky Way, and a collection of palate-cleansing satyr plays to be performed after. Grappling with both love and language, Theis' Medea "wants to join with the world, to meld with it. Let's let her do that—see what falls away."

Psalms for the Wreckage

$19.95

Psalms for the Wreckage collects Joshua Young's trilogy of scripts in verse—To the Chapel of Light (Mud Luscious Press, 2012), When the Wolves Quit (Gold Wake Press, 2012), and a third, previously unpublished play in verse This is the Way to Rule—in a single edition. Exploring faith, dogma, and the politics of power, Psalms for the Wreckage is a stunning collection of poetic, epistolary playwriting as well as a fascinating look at one author's evolving relationship with genre.

The Shapes We Make With Our Bodies

$12.95

Honey, our protagonist, is on the run from both her past and her present; avoiding questions about love, bodies, language, and the extents of all three. But her friends—the impish Maenads—refuse to just let her escape. The Shapes We Make With Our Bodies is a feminist, queer, maximalist piece—spanning caves, hills, courtrooms, and kitchens—about a woman torn by her desires, unwilling to bend to the needs of men, yet hesitant in the face of her wildness.

Cover image for The Shapes We Make With Our Bodies, isbn: 9780991418336

Bloodletting in Minor Scales: [A Canvas in Arms.]

$14.95

A mother attempts suicide and fails. Life goes on, but as her family picks up the pieces, gratitude mixes with sadness & anger at the attempted departure. In this dream-like play in verse, blood becomes a character, hearts are fed to the stage, and Dialogue delivers a monologue as Justin tries to determine whether he can truly forgive or forget what has been done.

Bloodletting in Minor Scales: [A Canvas in Arms.]

Bouquet

$17.00

Working between choreography, autobiography and poetry, Mariana Valencia reckons with individualism in her everyday life as a dancer as she moves across the United States, Mexico, the Balkans and into the geography of her past.

Brief Chronicle, Books 6–8

$17.00

In Brief Chronicle, Books 6–8, Agnes Borinsky delivers a play in a single column. A history play that grounds epic themes—longing, violence and imperialism, and the bond between mother and son—in the quiet ways we talk.

Untitled. (1-5)

$20.00

Winner of the Inaugural 3 Hole Press Open Call.

The Immeasurable Want of Light

$15.00

The Immeasurable Want of Light (IWL) is a play, illustrated by famed historian and painter, Nell Painter. IWL follows Maker, a black, overweight artist, as she comes of age in an alternate universe. This is an epic play consisting of twenty-eight distinct micro plays of varying language styles and forms that journeys through shifting perspectives of living in Black skin.

Cooking As Though You Might Cook Again

$23.00

Cooking As Though You Might Cook Again invites us to cook with our senses and to work with the passage of time. Licht’s lyrical recipes turn our attention away from strict measurements, and remind us of the pleasures and the importance of working with what we have.

Your Healing is Killing Me

$14.95

Your Healing is Killing Me is a performance manifesto based on lessons learned in San Antonio free health clinics and New York acupuncture schools; from the treatments and consejos of curanderas, abortion doctors, Marxist artists, community health workers, and bourgie dermatologists. One artist's reflections on living with post-traumatic stress disorder, ansia, and eczema in the new age of trigger warnings, the master cleanse, and crowd-funded self-care. Capitalism is toxic but the Revolution is not in your body butter.

The 53rd State Occasional No. 3

$10.00

For each edition of the Occasional, guest editors invite artists, thinkers, and members of our community to consider questions that we have and topics that move us. For Occasional No. 3, playwrights Lucas Baisch and Emma Horwitz have invited Liza Birkenmeier, Theresa Buchheister, Lisa D'Amour, dots, Diane Exavier, Zoë Geltman, Miguel Gutierrez, nazareth hassan, Orlando Hernández, Julia Izumi, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, Kate Kremer, Lisa Kron, Shayan Lotfi, Sam Max, Kate McGee, Eli Nixon, Marissa Joyce Stamps, reid tang, Jesús I. Valles, Noah Weinman, and Bailey Williams to respond to the question, “What are you obsessed with? And how are you holding it?”

All These Things: A Conversation

$10.00

In June 2022, Sharon Bridgforth and Daniel Alexander Jones held an intimate and searching conversation about the pragmatics of making art and engaging the communities--living and ancestral--from which their work emerges. The two longtime friends reflect on Bridgforth’s bull-jean & dem/dey back, a collection of two performance/novels written twenty-two years apart about the eponymous bull-jean (published in Sept 2022 by 53rd State Press). Bridgforth reveals how motherhood spurred her towards understanding her genders and sexuality, and how the desire to love, heal, and live in truth has compelled her writing and her life choices. Bridgforth details the weave between her early work in social justice (based in Austin, TX, where she and Jones met), her artmaking, and her remarkable commitment to community. Bridgforth's writing starts in the marrow of her own healing. As they discuss Bridgforth's work--as well as the work of such luminaries as Laurie Carlos, Robbie McCauley, Ntozake Shange, Urban Bush Women, raúlrsalinas, and Beverly Glenn-Copeland--Jones and Bridgforth offer tested strategies for living a grounded artistic life.

Guía de campo de iLANDing

$15.00

La Guía de campo de iLANDing contiene 75 partituras para la investigación de espacios urbanos que fueron desarrolladas a lo largo de diez años por el Laboratorio Interdisciplinario de Arte, Naturaleza y Danza. En estos laboratorios, artistas y científicos generaban metodologías híbridas para un acercamiento a la ecología urbana fundamentado en la danza y diseñado para cualquiera que desee experimentar la incursión de la naturaleza en la ciudad o descentrar los métodos antropocéntricos habituales de navegar por el mundo. Lleva una introducción de la fundadora de iLAND, Jennifer Monson.

Ramp / Mushroom

$16.00

In the plays collected here—Ramp and Mushroom—Pulitzer Prize finalist Eisa Davis mingles modes of myth and speculation, documentary and fiction in two plays about family, desire, restorative justice, ecological sustainability, and immigration amongst the working class. Ramp adapts the foundational Egyption saga of Isis / Osiris and sets on a near-future airline ramp, where siblings Isis, Osiris, Seth, and Nepthys throw luggage on planes and bicker about our thorny, precipitate futurity: should change be fast or gradual? Can the ecological revolution we require for survival produce ease and peace if it’s rooted in violence? Is the path to utopia brutal? Must it be? Mushroom centers on the lives, loves, and working conditions of the Mexican and Central American mushroom-pickers in and around the town of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, where over 40% of all the mushrooms we eat in this country come from. Through a series of intersecting narratives traversed by English, Spanish, K'iche' and Malayalam speakers, Mushroom considers a workplace dispute that has serious ramifications for multiple immigrant families, mapping how compassion and justice might intersect.

Particle and Wave

$10.00

In a roving, shimmering conversation that took place in May 2021, scholar, poet, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs and playwright, songwriter, performance artist, and educator Daniel Alexander Jones discuss love as a foundational principle of artistic practice and societal change. Reflecting on Love Like Light, Daniel Alexander Jones's collection of seven plays and performance texts (published by 53rd State in July 2021), DAJ and APG illuminate the ways in which an attention to care, community, nuance, invitation, perceptual particularities, and embodied conditions can resist the profoundly extractive context in which life is lived and art is made. As they discuss the work of Audre Lorde, Billie Holiday, Beah Richards, Bayard Rustin, and Malcolm X, as well as that of DAJ's grandma Daisy Mae and APG's grandmother, aunt, and niece, DAJ and APG propose that love, like light, suffuses everything, and that love, like light, creates a field in which transformation, justice, healing, and radical beauty are not just possible—they are already, now.

Severed

$12.00

Dark, disturbing, deft, irreverent, and revelatory, Ignacio Lopez’s monologue is at once a coming-of-age story, a horror story, and a highly theatrical experiment in radical empathy. Weaving together two very different voices grappling with strikingly similar crises of sexuality and conscience, Severed asks: where do we draw the line between human and monster, severing, as we do so, the possibility of empathy, forgiveness, and understanding? What happens when we see ourselves reflected in the monster’s eye?

ASTRS

$12.00

A rabbit cosmogony, a libretto to be sung, spoken, and projected, a radio-play-folk-opera-duck-animation-with-dances, ASTRS is set in the 53rd State of the Union, zone of the sixth chrysanthemum, where Augustus B. Rabbit and Sibyl Kempson meet in a place where the end times can't seem to wrap it up and the middle times hang around eternally. A pre-middle play by 53rd State's founding editor offers a roadmap to the 53rd State and to the troubled state of the present fifty. It should come as no surprise: "in the cosmos," as Keithley writes, "associations ring across disances. In the 53rd state they meet in the corner."

A Discourse on Method

$14.00

A Discourse on Method is a paranoid theory and a counterfactual history of American method acting, conducted in two parts. The first is Shonni Enelow’s account of a journey into the churning guts of the Method archives; the second is David Levine’s monologue Edition of Eight, delivered by an artificial human. Illustrated throughout with spiritual, conspiratorial, and documentary images.

Milton

$16.95

In 2012, Lisa D'Amour and Katie Pearl--known collectively as PearlDamour--began visiting five small American towns named Milton. From Louisiana to North Carolina to Wisconsin to Massachusetts, these several Miltons span the country like an earth-bound constellation. Over the course of the past five years, PearlDamour has developed a series of performances, each focused on (and performed in) a particular Milton while yet providing a sense of the whole constellation. Milton includes scripts and photos from PearlDamour’s performances in Milton, LA, Milton-Freewater, OR, and Milton, MA as well as reflections on the process and practice of community-based art making.

The People’s Republic of Valerie, Living Room Edition

$12.00

“In the Bright Future, the environmental rampage will have ended, amnesty will be given to all those who return to their senses, and it will be said, ‘We are not free yet, but we are on our way!’” On an asterism situated between two constellations in a universe not far from this one, a motley assortment of well-meaning but ineffectual people—who have been psychically kidnapped—train and prepare for the Bright Future, an almost-utopia they will eventually be deployed to enact back on planet Earth. Part boot-camp space-travel memoir, part how-to manual for the construction of a paradise, The People’s Republic of Valerie, Living Room Edition is an attempt to transform feelings of despair, grief, and rage into something of value, into positive action, into something of beauty that might uplift and create space and occasion for imagination and community.

The People’s Republic of Valerie, Living Room Edition

Off the Hozzle

$12.00

Lumberob (Rob Erickson) is a singular phenomenon of language, looping and manic-obsessive performance intensity. Erickson's writing employs a syntax wholly his own, patterning words by working them through a physical obstacle course and so creating a performance text that really undoes any useful distinctions between language and embodiment. Off the Hozzle is lurching, digressing, doing-undoing, and unlike any other play.

No Dice

$14.00

Obsessive, persuasive and enduring, Nature Theater has remade the epic form into something newly familiar and contemporary. No Dice is a transcription of the company's four-hour dinner theater event. The dinner is a bologna sandwich and a Dr. Pepper. The theater is made of phone conversations reset into a hyper-energetic physical and vocal register. "A tour de force." -NY Times

Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag

$16.00

Set in Alabama at the scene of James Agee and Walker Evans’s famous reporting, Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag brings Sibyl Kempson’s attention to the ethical snares of poetic journalism and what it means to work on the land. She interrogates the strange energy of images, both their potential to anesthetize response, and their invitation to be approached as hermeneutic thresholds between visible and invisible orders. Interwoven with sources from Agee and Walker to Sontag, to inscriptions on Assyrian mythological seals, and nested in a set of images from other performances, the play holds forth in its own genre, a bad-ventriloquism visitation seed-eating prayer ceremony with songs. The entire score, composed by Kempson’s longtime collaborator Ashley Turba, completes the book.

Life and Times: Episodes 3 & 4

$12.00

Parts three and four of Nature Theater of Oklahoma's grand theatrical presentation of an unremarkable life, of which Charles Isherwood of the New York Times wrote, "Entrancing, maddening, heartbreaking, sidesplitting, even, in its humble way, awe-inspiring. . . . An ambitious, brilliantly executed production from one of the most innovative theater companies in New York."

Another Telepathic Thing

$25.00

An expanded documentation -- combining oral history, drawings, video stills and an annotated script -- of Big Dance Theater's Another Telepathic Thing (2000), which combined Mark Twain's novella The Mysterious Stranger, illicitly recorded audition tapes, several parasols, and many other ingenious things.

Another Tree Dance

$20.00

Another Tree Dance is a poet's essay, an essay for a room, for the mouth, the hand, the ear, a philosophy housed not in concepts but in sentences, storyboards, gestures, slides, songs, visible and invisible things. With additional essays on performance.

Created as the oblique cousin to her dissertation on Emerson, Karinne Keithley Syers’s Another Tree Dance mines the images of her personal and creative history, coaxing from private recursions the abyssal dives and uncertain floats of thinking through a life that swims and glitters.

The following is what I experienced. ...A sensation of expectant awareness, excited stillness, and a pervasive, overwhelmingly unnameable foreboding which resulted not in fear but in acceptance.” - Eric Conroe

it utterly bewitched me” Elizabeth Zimmer

Life and Times: Episode 2

$12.00

The second episode finishes the musical portion of Nature Theater of Oklahoma's epic tale generated from the single simple question, asked of a friend: "Can you tell me your life story?" The Life and Times cycle enjoyed a widely acclaimed run in New York's Under the Radar Festival in January 2013, produced by Soho Rep, New York City.

A Map of Virtue and Black Cat Lost

$14.00

This volume collects two plays by Erin Courtney, A Map of Virtue and Black Cat Lost. The Obie Awardwinning Map is a symmetrical play: part interview, part comedy, part horror story. Courtney's plays unfold in a delicate dance of pattern and narration; they ring out their images and meanings as a sequence of bells: complicating, harmonizing, and remapping their senses as they run their idiosyncratic course.

The Mayor of Baltimore and Anthem

$14.00

This volume includes The Mayor of Baltimore and its companion piece Anthem from Kristen Kosmas, whose writing invents its poetry from the blunt, the found, and the discarded. A coterie of friends and strangers gather to celebrate a modest electoral victory. Oblique poetry alternates with the syncopated clatter of small talk. A brokenhearted refrain of disappointment underscores, and a tiny aria of self-revelation hangs in the empty space after the guests leave.

When You Rise Up

$12.00

When You Rise Up collects texts by relentlessly exploratory choreographer Miguel Gutierrez, who engages artistic community in a radical sense, interrogating physical encounter at all scales, from the collaborating performers to the world where the work takes place. Standing alone from their original contexts, these pieces radiate with the physical urgency of a life committed to art and performance.

Rambo Solo

$14.00

Continues Nature Theater's investigation into transcription as epic theater. Zachary Oberzan's exhaustive retelling of David Morrell's First Blood unfurls along a vein of spectacular psychic charge. Simultaneously giving John Rambo's life Homeric form, performing Oberzan's own relationship to the book, and anticipating his planned solo remake of the movie, Rambo Solo obliterates distinctions between the ridiculous and the redemptive.

Crime or Emergency

$14.00

A play meant to challenge our normalized expectations of cause and effect, to suggest post-logical incoherence as the basis of human motivation, feeling, and violence, and to threaten our Aristotelian/Stanislavskian conceptions of contemporary American theater and identity as we safely understand it. Contains impossibly expensive stage directions and early Bruce Springsteen songs.

Montgomery Park, or Opulence

$12.00

Montgomery Park, or Opulence is an essay in the form of a building, a performance text in the form of a series of tales out of the archive of a fictional asylum, stories of combination with forms of consciousness beyond the human varieties. Keithley's staging won a 2011 BESSIE Award for Outstanding Production.

A Field Guide to iLANDing

$15.00

iLAND (Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance) is a dance research organization that investigates the power of dance, in collaboration with other fields, to illuminate our kinetic understanding of the world. Here they offer a handbook to take into the field, with an introduction by iLAND founder Jennifer Monson.

The Javier Plays

$30.00

Chicago-based playwright Carlos Murillo's The Javier Plays is an inventive and epic trilogy that delves into themes of authenticity, truth, and self-made mythology. This collection includes the plays Diagram of a Paper Airplane, A Thick Description of Harry Smith (Volume 1), and Your Name Will Follow You Home.

Minor Theater

$16.00

This book collects three plays and one manifesto by writer-director Julia Jarcho, including American Treasure, Dreamless Land, and Grimly Handsome, winner of a 2013 Obie award for Best New American Play.

The 53rd State Occasional No. 2

$10.00

Each edition of the Occasional invites a guest editor to talk with artists, thinkers and members of our community about questions that we have and topics that move us. For the second issue, we invited playwright Will Arbery to do the asking, and in turn he invited Alex Borinsky, Matty Davis, Masuq Mushtaq Deen, Corinne Donly, David Greenspan, Phillip Howze, Julia Jarcho, Modesto Flako Jimenez, Mia Katigbak, MJ KAufman, Kristine Haruna Lee, Sofya Levitsky-Weitz, Daaimah Mubashshir, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, Zach Rufa, Caitlin Ryan O'Connell, Ren Dara Santiago, Celine Song, Jordan Tannahill, Kate Tarker, Alice Tuan, Korde Arrington Tuttle, and Madeline Wise to consider the notion of "invitation."